(c) What I call "Gotcha! questions." If it appears to me the author WANTS me to get it wrong by offering a tricky question that has an alternate incorrect choice he knows I'll go for, that's a GOTCHA! Too many of them and the quizzer earns a less-than-stellar rating from me.

I don't mind them - in fact, it often makes the quiz better (IMO). It might make the questions harder, but you have already said that the difficulty doesn't affect the rating.

As for obviously incorrect answer choices, I hate them. Just because there are 3 incorrect answers doesn't mean you have to make it easier for players - use a true/false if you want them to have a 50:50 chance of guessing it right, and if you make all 3 answer choices obviously wrong then you might as well be asking what 1+1 is. I have seen plenty of ridiculous answers, but not a single funny one. I can't see how giving Bob the Builder as an option for the person who founded Facebook or asking whether Abraham Lincoln was a ancient Egyptian god would make anyone laugh.

Maybe the time taken to construct a quiz could be noted somewhere on the title page or in the rating section? Someone who takes several hours and puts together an enlightening or entertaining, or both, quiz should get higher kudos than someone who threw one together in an hour. Not to say a quality quiz cannot be constructed in a short period for some quiz types or subject matters but I'm thinking reviews before submittals take time and that might be a factor raters (and subsequently rankers) would want to consider.

Edit: I think this still stands the test of 'write it on a word processor first'. That method takes a lot of time to copy over to individual boxes and review that no copy errors have been made. Until FT allows the wholesale translation from a database that copies a template into a template, good quiz construction should take a couple of hours.

Edited by mehaul (Mon Jul 23 201211:57 AM)

_________________________If you aren't seeing Heaven while you dream, you're doing something wrong.Dreams allow escape from the passage of Time.

Maybe the time taken to construct a quiz could be noted somewhere on the title page or in the rating section? Someone who takes several hours and puts together an enlightening or entertaining, or both, quiz should get higher kudos than someone who threw one together in an hour.

If that is created, that might affect the ratings people give. Then people will start to cheat and just leave the quiz writing page on for hours without actually writing anything or altering anything.

If that is created, that might affect the ratings people give. Then people will start to cheat and just leave the quiz writing page on for hours without actually writing anything or altering anything.

I agree. I do actually write my quizzes in the quiz form instead of in a word processor. I like to be able to look at the questions as I go as they would appear to someone taking the quiz. I use this feature (that appears as an option every time you save a quiz) a lot when doing my quizzes. I just can't get that same feel in a word processor. I don't consider this cheating the system as the system now stands because no one cares how long the quiz editor was open. I often change my mind mid-quiz about the number of questions I want to ask and it's nice to move them around in the actual form. I just feel better designing/writing this way. It wouldn't be fair to someone else who writes their quiz someplace else and translates it into the form, taking less time, to rated worse for it, just because it takes me a long time in the actual form, though we may take the actual same time writing the quiz. I hope that all made sense...

You can usually tell, without a time stamp, how long it took someone to make a quiz. I don't think it's necessary to include that time anywhere on the quiz itself.

Good ratings should be the reward for errorless effort presented and poor rankings should result for those who toss them together willy-nilly. Now we make the distinction based in the way all above have said: mood, errors, factual failings, Interesting Info quality or lack thereof, etc. I would like to have just that little more data to help me make my mind up. As Agony stated, the editors know if the figure is bunk or representative of the real value. Allow editors to set the figure as an approximation on their part. Leave the author out of it. Just as we rank in generalities, the editors at submission can estimate several levels: under an hour; 1-2 hours; 2-8 hours; days.

_________________________If you aren't seeing Heaven while you dream, you're doing something wrong.Dreams allow escape from the passage of Time.

Then there's a chance that for those who copied in their quiz in say 10 minutes although they worked on it for many hours will get negative ratings because people think they didn't spend too much time on it? Also, you have to consider that some people naturally work faster than others - faster workers may manage to write a 10 question quiz on a subject they know well (thus no need for much research) in under an hour, and it may well be of a very high standard. I don't see why on Earth players would need to know the time it took to write the quiz - judge it for what it is.

Then there's a chance that for those who copied in their quiz in say 10 minutes although they worked on it for many hours will get negative ratings because people think they didn't spend too much time on it

Agreed! Moreover, there's no way of telling how much time an author actually spends working on a quiz. The time from creation of the template to submission is quite meaningless. For example, I tend to create my templates and submit then work on them off and on for months. Obviously, that doesn't mean that I've sweating over writing the quiz for months!

My 8 movie anagram quizzes are all rated in the top 10,000 and took me many, many, many hours of work. The first quiz was submitted very quickly after I loaded the quiz template but only because I wrote it all on a word document first. I find it easier to work that way. It also means I don't need the internet to work on my quiz if my laptop is somewhere with no internet access. The quizzes were fine tuned over weeks and once I was happy with it I submitted it. If the time to write a quiz was based on the time from starting a template to submission it would be totally inaccurate and give people the wrong impression about the effort that was put in. I would hate to be judged on that factor as I find it irrelevant. If a quiz is good, it's good. It doesn't matter if it took one hour or month. The same applies if it's not so good.

If a quiz is good, it's good. It doesn't matter if it took one hour or month. The same applies if it's not so good.

Hear, hear! I need about an hour (for most of my quizzes - there have been a few exceptions) just to copy from my Word document into the template and proofread in editing screen then again in preview screen, and make those last little adjustments. That's after I wrote it, rearranged it, read it aloud for euphony, had a friend proofread the hard copy, checked again that the order of questions made sense, (and that I didn't change verb tenses as I was about to do in that last clause), and that all the red squiggles in the Word document were shortcomings in its dictionary, not my typing. Since it can take up to an hour or more to research each question in order to be sure that it is accurate, especially as regards the extra information (and different sources often give different bits of information, which has to be factored in), the hour or so between starting the template and submitting the quiz bears litttle resemblance to the time that went into it.

At the other end of the time spectrum, there's the Author challenge that has to be claimed and have its template set up, but which may then sit for a couple of weeks while I decide exactly how I am going to use it, and get the quiz written ready to place into the template. Once inspiration hits, I might actually write the quiz in a couple of hours, if it's a topic that requires little research. There is simply no way that information about the time between template creation and quiz submission has meaningful information.

What's more, it is the product, not the process, that should be judged. I have written quizzes that were on a topic so familiar to me that I was able to write the quiz in only a couple of hours. There have been others for which the research and planning took over 20 hours, often spread out over several weeks. Which ones are better? That's a matter of opinion. Just because I took a lot of time to write a particular quiz does not mean that I successfully achieved my vision for it.

Of course I wasn't meaning transcription time to be measured. But an editor would know if a week hold out on an anagram quiz template represented a week's worth of research, trial phrasing, reworking and information assembly. But otherwise, if a lengthy question, answer and info quiz was done in an hour and reads with errors to the editor as poor work, I would like some hint from the editor (in this case their time to write estimation) that the quiz was indeed thrown together without much thought. If the editor then gets the quiz reworked by the author, the time to submit would go up, it should be a better product and the editor would then be justified in increasing their estimate of time to write to the next level. Heck, it wouldn't even need to be a mandatory quiz suffix, but giving it to us now and then could help achieve better, more representative rankings.

Edit to add: If some that are doing ratings don't realize what it takes to write a quiz, a time tagged to it might make them more aware. A good question, answer and info c(sh)ould take at least a couple of hours alone. Multiply that by ten questions, adjust order if necessary, transcribe and then proof read again, a good quiz might take a day and I think an editor would have a measure of that intricacy. A rater then seeing a day was put into the product and, even though not a familiar topic to the taker, perhaps a better ranking would result. I see a time value shown would make it easier for us to also see the ones that didn't get that attention in their conception and help us to sort between poor, good and excellent.

Edited by mehaul (Mon Jul 23 201209:29 PM)

_________________________If you aren't seeing Heaven while you dream, you're doing something wrong.Dreams allow escape from the passage of Time.

Mehaul, I think you overestimate the editors' mindreading abilities. It is easy to tell when a poor quiz has not had enough time and effort put in - and players won't see it then. However, it may subsequently have many more hours of work put in before it can go online, and even then may just meet the minimum requirements. That quiz writer may have put in much more time than a more experienced author, familiar with the guidelines for the chosen category and dealing with familiar subject matter, who can produce an outstanding quiz in a few hours. Judge the product, not the time involved.

If you want editors to assign arbitrary times that relate to the quality of the quiz, that is like asking us to rate it before players see it, and that is simply not the way it works.

Originally Posted By: AdamM7If that is created, that might affect the ratings people give.

Exactly.

So...we should be basing our ratings on something that has very little to do with the quiz in the first place? What if someone copied the quiz from a Word document? We'd have no idea if it was submitted in under ten minutes after a years-worth of writing or an hours-worth.

Quote:

Just as we rank in generalities, the editors at submission can estimate several levels: under an hour; 1-2 hours; 2-8 hours; days.

I don't get this at all.

Quote:

Of course I wasn't meaning transcription time to be measured. But an editor would know if a week hold out on an anagram quiz template represented a week's worth of research, trial phrasing, reworking and information assembly. But otherwise, if a lengthy question, answer and info quiz was done in an hour and reads with errors to the editor as poor work, I would like some hint from the editor (in this case their time to write estimation) that the quiz was indeed thrown together without much thought.

There's no way for us to know this; there's no way to know if an author is 'trying' or not because it's completely subjective. For instance we have a lot of English-as-a-second-language authors on here who need the extra help just to form grammatically-stable sentences. If these people are producing very basic quizzes for more-qualified English speakers, who are we to say 'this was put together with immense work and thought' or 'this was put together by someone who didn't really work with us'. And who are we to make that claim if they (A) don't tell us they're ESL or (B) go out of their way to seek help from other people on or off the site or (C) popped it into a Google Translator or (D)...on and on and on.

Quote:

What's more, it is the product, not the process, that should be judged.

Amen.

I don't get why the 'estimated work' or 'time this took to get online' or 'effort factor' is relevant. Sometimes our more seasoned authors will discuss how long some of their quizzes have been waiting in the creation stage, sometimes as bits of paper on the side of their computer and sometimes in scraps written on cue cards on their nightstand-- and YEARS before they make it online in some cases-- but that's just a little tidbit that really has nothing to do with the quiz itself, I mean the cut-and-dried, finished, and final product, unless you decide that that's a factor that makes sense.

We're not telling you how to rate the quizzes by any means (like I said, a lot of this is subjective) but the goal is to get players to enjoy the 'FUN', quality trivia we place online in its (as I said) finished and final product.

You don't need to know what the editor corrected beforehand on other peoples' quizzes, or how long it took to do it, or even what the editor thought about it...or even which editor placed it online...or even if we all talked about it for weeks to get it categorized properly...or how many back-and-forth notes we had with the author to see it online. I don't think that's what most of our authors want you to focus on either, not because it will (or should) make or break the factors that allow you to rate the quiz, but because it's irrelevant.

I agree with everything that has been said so far. Even if we could overcome the difficulties inherent in measuring the time spent on writing a quiz, I still don't think that such information would be useful in deciding how to rate a quiz.

The quality of a quiz does not vary proportionately with the time spent writing it. Case in point: Most of the current Sprint quizzes are being written in a very short amount of time, and I have played many that are just excellent. It probably wouldn't make much difference if the author spent another month working on the quiz - the end result is already fantastic.

The other extreme would be quizzes that I have seen as an editor that have gone through multiple rounds of editing spanning months or even years before going online, and sometimes the end result barely meets the minimum requirements for the site. Should the quiz be rated 'excellent' just because a lot of time and effort was expended into making it? I'm not so sure about that.

I finally got my second sunglasses! Weird, however, because both of my sunglassed quizzes went online on July 3rd (09 and 12).

I don't remember how long it took to type it, but its now ranked in the 20,000s.

I had a quiz with sunnies that I made back in 2006 when I first joined FunTrivia. The quiz still had sunnies when I came back a few month ago, but recently lost them. I'm thinking this is because it has been a long time since the quiz was regularly played, and other quizzes have just passed it in the rankings. It's still 23231 though, so it's close to sunnies! even if it doesn't have them anymore... *fake tears*.

It actually really doesn't matter that much to me where my quizzes are in the rankings as long as more people rated it Good and Excellent than they did the three ratings choices that I can't see. In my mind this is a win, because more people, who cared enough to rate my quiz, liked it than didn't. No one wants to make a quiz people don't enjoy, so a majority of positives is all I ask for.

I have two quizzes that I took an exceptional amount of time in composing, and just because they are marked as "very difficult," both of them are ranked in the 90,000's, yet I spent about five months putting the quiz together. I put a lot of research into both of these quizzes, yet neither are ranked well. The editor that placed them online enjoyed editing both of them, and liked how they came out. The first of the two was an Author Challenge, and I was able to make it work into a second quiz that I put together myself. It still took the better part of two months to do it, and, again, ranks very low due to the "difficulty" of the quiz. To me, they are the two best quizzes I've written, but the rankings say otherwise.

Not only did I learn quite a bit putting these two quizzes together, but I also tried to make it where the quiz taker would learn some things as well. If I score two on a quiz that I knew nothing about and ten on a quiz I know a lot about, the one I scored two on will get a higher ranking, just because the author took the time to put it together. Granted, I can't tell if it was posted into the quiz template in a matter of ten minutes, as quizzes can be written offsite in Word or some other text editor, so I can't necessarily base a rating on just that.

_________________________
The way to get things done is NOT to mind who gets the credit for doing them. --Benjamin JowettNo one can make you feel inferior without your consent. --Eleanor RooseveltThe day we lose our will to fight is the day we lose our freedom.

I have two quizzes that I took an exceptional amount of time in composing, and just because they are marked as "very difficult," both of them are ranked in the 90,000's, yet I spent about five months putting the quiz together. I put a lot of research into both of these quizzes, yet neither are ranked well. The editor that placed them online enjoyed editing both of them, and liked how they came out. The first of the two was an Author Challenge, and I was able to make it work into a second quiz that I put together myself. It still took the better part of two months to do it, and, again, ranks very low due to the "difficulty" of the quiz. To me, they are the two best quizzes I've written, but the rankings say otherwise.

I'm not sure that the difficulty plays as much into it as you may think, though it is a possibility as to a lower ranking. From my own quiz creation experience, my harder quizzes (Very Hard and Difficult) have been ranked higher than my easier (still Tough) quizzes. There may be a larger variation/trend from Very Easy to Impossible than I get in my limited Tough to Very Hard quizzes, though, that you may be experiencing in yours quizzes (quiz naivety on my part in that case).

If you could post a link/links to the quizzes you talk about, I would love to take a stab at them. I've just completed an Author Challenge quiz myself, and know the work that goes into them and the new things that even the author learns along the way!

If you could post a link/links to the quizzes you talk about, I would love to take a stab at them.

I can't post them here as we cannot post the quiz titles themselves, but will send you one of the titles via PM.

_________________________
The way to get things done is NOT to mind who gets the credit for doing them. --Benjamin JowettNo one can make you feel inferior without your consent. --Eleanor RooseveltThe day we lose our will to fight is the day we lose our freedom.

mehaul, how many times I got to tell ya not to poke that beehive with a pointy stick? You gotta save that stick fo' poking the dead body down in the Shallows. Now run along and go chase Forest or something.

Okay Maw.

_________________________If you aren't seeing Heaven while you dream, you're doing something wrong.Dreams allow escape from the passage of Time.